The Long Way Home 4.3.26

CBS Radio Brings the News

My longtime friend Kay (Uncle Kay) Carsten, when faced with changing circumstances, would consistently say, “Nothing stays the same, except rocks.” 

As a budding business tycoon, I loved it when he told me that. Now that I’m just a self-appointed observer, I find myself overly nostalgic about all the changes society has undergone since the 1950s. 

Recently, CBS News announced it is shutting down its radio news service next month after nearly a century of operation. The network was born in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters. A young cigar entrepreneur, William S. Paley, took over in 1928 and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. In the early years, radio didn't "do" news. They just read bulletins from the newspapers. CBS broke the mold in 1932 by ignoring a news embargo to report live on the Lindbergh kidnapping. 

Radio news was the social media of the middle part of the 20th Century. From the Roaring Twenties through a worldwide depression, Americans tuned in to the radio for the latest news and entertainment. During the Second World War, a new breed of journalists emerged, such as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They transformed radio reporting and brought television news to life. The media juggernaut that was radio news has withered over the years. 

Today, television, the internet, social media, and satellite radio have replaced network radio news. High costs and a radical shift in audience behavior drive the decision to shutter the service. 

Reflecting on this transformation, the curmudgeon I’ve become thinks we’re trading the work of legitimate broadcast journalists for a thousand different podcasts, each with its own bias and its own set of ads for mattresses and VPNs. 

This nostalgia extends to other pillars of traditional broadcasting. If CBS Radio News was the gold standard of American news, the Voice of America (VOA) was the heavy-duty transmission line that carried the American story to the rest of the world. The VOA was born just 56 days after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. realized that Nazi Germany was winning the radio war, and America didn't even have a federal shortwave station. On February 1, 1942, William Harlan Hale spoke into a microphone in New York and said,  "The news may be good or bad for us—we will always tell you the truth."

In 1947, the VOA began broadcasting into the Soviet Union, which President Reagan, almost four decades later, called The Evil Empire. VOA started with what became its standard greeting,  "Hello! This is New York calling." In 1954, VOA moved its headquarters from New York to Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., where it sits today. The last few years have been turbulent for the VOA. There were significant legal and political battles over the "firewall"—the rule that prevents government officials from interfering with VOA’s editorial content. Following decades of service, the VOA reportedly ceased its primary news reporting operations on March 15, 2026. Like CBS Radio News, the VOA fell victim to a digital landscape in which shortwave radio has been replaced by satellite and internet services, and to a fragmented global audience.

The VOA wasn't always perfect—it was a government engine, after all—but for a guy sitting in a basement in Prague or a hut in Vietnam, that signal was a mechanical tether to a world where you could actually say what you thought without fear. 

As a debate rages about mail ballot voting, the future of the USPS is also shrouded in dread. Tracing its origins to the beginning of the Republic, the post office was considered essential for an informed public. Some of us recall two mail deliveries to our homes in the 1950s, Monday through Friday, with one on Saturday. Still today, most of the settled areas in our country, even at the end of the Gunflint Trail, receive mail deliveries six days a week.

Now that penpals are on email servers and bills and payments are online, the volume of mail handled by USPS has declined dramatically. If not for the insurance agents and realtors, along with almost every politician during election campaigns (not to mention newspapers like this one), there’d be virtually no physical mail at all. It seems inevitable that we will see reductions in USPS service soon. That could help destroy the mail-ballot system that rural counties like Cook have relied on for almost 30 years. 

Perhaps wisdom comes when one concedes, as Uncle Kay said, that 'Nothing stays the same, except rocks.' While I am an unapologetic traditionalist, I recognize that change opens new doors—even if I’d prefer to walk through the old ones. Most of today's tech makes me shake my head in disbelief; it drives me to ask, "Why?'